Supernerds (English Edition)

Conversations with Heroes

Angela Richter, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Richter Daniel, Jochen Stremmel, Julian Pörksen

• Editore: Alexander Verlag
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783895813887
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoria: Biographies politiques

'It's a type of reorganization or infection of humanity's thought system, the way humanity talks to itself, the way a society thinks. It's like everyone simultaneously is taking LSD.' Julian Assange'No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who think they're free.' Johann Wolfgang von GoetheEver since Edward Snowden's NSA disclosures, the might of the secret services and the helplessness of everyday citizens are there all around us for everyone to see. But who is taking up the fight against global surveillance and the erosion of democracy?Theater director Angela Richter has conducted in-depth interviews with a number of well-known whistleblowers and internet activists - the 'Supernerds'.Conversations with Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg, Jesselyn Radack, William Binney, Jeremy Hammond and Thomas Drake, an Essay by Barrett Brown and drawings by Daniel Richter.

You and I, Cassandra

A conversation with Daniel Ellsberg

Richter I have interviewed many whistleblowers to date, and one thing is very interesting and strange to me: except for Julian Assange, they are all very engaged Americans, you know. This kind of “patriotism” is weird for Europeans. Especially for Germans, considering our history.

Ellsberg That’s surprising to hear. You know, we all take the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It is not an oath to the President. It is not an oath to secrecy. And it’s not an oath to protect the country. It’s an oath to protect the Constitution. There’s no question that George W. Bush and Barack Obama – blatantly – have violated that oath, as did I and Snowden and Manning, before we became whistleblowers. If you observe a crime, it’s your duty to report it or to obstruct it. So we were upholding our oath in a way that these people never did. But you don’t get punished for breaking the oath to the Constitution. What you get punished for is not breaking your oath, for revealing the secrets of the crimes of your superiors, your agency, the executive branch, the Congress, the President. Most whistleblowers don’t foresee at the very beginning how serious the costs are going to be. Some do. Snowden clearly knew what he was in for. Chelsea Manning did impress me very much when she wrote to Adrian Lamo: I don’t care as much about going to prison for life or even being executed. I’m willing to do that. But I don’t want my picture plastered all over the world –

Richter As a boy.

Ellsberg As a boy. Which she got. Her worst nightmare was realized.

Richter Were you aware of the risks?

Ellsberg I was aware. I copied 7,000 pages of top secret documents. I assumed they’ll put me in prison for life.

Richter So you were very lucky in the end.

Ellsberg I was very lucky. It was, as you say, a miraculous set of circumstances that ended my trial, and helped to end the war. You know, nowadays I’m being described very positively. As a foil against Manning and Snowden, which I don’t accept at all. I identify with them totally. They’re no more traitors than I am, and I’m not. That’s only one of the things we all got called. I used to think “whistleblower” was a bad word.

Richter Like “traitor”? In this sense?

Ellsberg Let me tell you an interesting story: I got a whistleblower award in Berlin, from the Federation of German Scientists in association with IALANA (International Lawyers Against Nuclear Weapons). It was in the nineties, I think. So I’m waiting behind the stage about to be introduced to the German audience. And just before we went out I asked the main judge of the Administrative Supreme Court in Germany: what is the German word for whistleblower?

Richter There is no German word for that.

Ellsberg He says: we don’t have one. So I said: what’s the closest you would come to it in German? He thinks for just a second and says: Verraeter.

Richter Verraeter, yeah. A traitor.

Ellsberg Traitor … I asked him, whether he knows a better word. He says: “Petze.”

Richter Petze! Ja, genau^*.

Ellsberg Tattletale, snitch! It has the same connotations in America. The problem is: there simply are no mythical heroes of truth-telling. I’ve asked people who know myth, and metaphor. I told them that I am looking for somebody you can refer to as a model. In history, or fiction or mythology – someone who did what we did, who told secrets of the tribe, the secrets of the elders, the secrets of the establishment, for the benefit of the people. There aren’t any.

Richter Isn’t that interesting? Except maybe for Prometheus and Cassandra.

Ellsberg But Cassandra did not reveal secrets, she told the future – you could say it’s a kind of secret. But the people don’t believe her.

Richter That’s her curse.

Ellsberg In that regard I associate myself with her, because I’m always telling these terrible things that we’ve got to do something about, and people don’t believe me.

Richter In Catholic belief, sometimes the Virgin Mary appears, like in Lourdes, and tells people secrets.

Ellsberg She foretells what’s going to happen?

Richter Yes. For example, in Bosnia-Herzegovina there is a place called Medjugorje. In the middle of the eighties, before the war, they say that Mother Mary appeared and predicted the Yugoslav War to six children. But it was a secret and they were not allowed to reveal it.

Ellsberg There is a poem, by Robinson Jeffers, called Cassandra. He was predicting the Second World War. Let me see if I can remember this:

The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers

Hooked in the stones of the wall,

The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter,

Cassandra,

Whether the people believe

Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth, they’d liefer

Meet a tiger on the road.

Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion-

Vendors and political men

Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kind

Wisdom. Poor bitch be wise.

No: you’ll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men

And gods disgusting – you and I, Cassandra.

Richter You know what? It changed my life. WikiLeaks and everything. I became an activist. I was always somebody who was politically attentive. I demonstrated when I was young, against the Iraq War, the Gulf War. But there was a phase when I had the feeling that you cannot do anything. So I became an artist, because I thought: at least I can do art and express myself. And I was really happy in my private life, but I always felt some kind of void.

Ellsberg Well that’s a reason to be an activist.

Richter And then WikiLeaks happened. And the Manning revelations. And I thought: Something can be done after all.

Ellsberg I waited 40 years for Manning. That’s why I was so enthusiastic when she appeared. And then, three years later: Snowden.

Richter When I learned how many people had access to the same material as Manning I was shocked. There are millions! And she’s the only one who leaked?!

Ellsberg Humans will do anything to avoid being kicked out of a valued group. Even when they realize that it is no longer behaving respectably, or that it’s criminal or doing bad things. The idea of being thrown out of that group and ostracized by the society is unbearable. And hardly anyone will do it, for any reason. They just go along.

Richter You didn’t go along. You decided to expose the government, to publish the Pentagon Papers. Did you have any help?

Ellsberg A friend helped me a little, Anthony Russo. He had revealed torture in Vietnam and was very anti-war. And he had a girlfriend who had a small ad agency with a Xerox machine. He helped me copying six or seven times – but I went on far beyond that on my own, for over a year. When it all came out, he refused to testify against me. And so, to punish him, they made him part of the indictment. Later they dropped the charges.

Richter What impact did the publishing of the Pentagon Papers make?

Ellsberg First of all: what did turn out to have a big impact was Nixon’s well-founded fear that I had documents beyond the Pentagon Papers, documents on his administration and their plans for escalation in Vietnam. His secret plan to end the war in a way that would allow him to keep the pro-American regime in power by threatening the North to destroy them with nuclear weapons, if they did not remove all their troops from the South. Nixon had reason to believe that I had documents on these threats, although I did not. The crimes he took against me were actually in order to stop me from putting out more material.

Richter What crimes did he commit?

Ellsberg First he went to my psychoanalyst’s office, trying to get information to blackmail me with or to destroy my reputation. But he didn’t find what he wanted. He found the period when I was a swinger, but one of his men said: “That would just improve Ellsberg’s popularity.” So, they didn’t put that out. My psychoanalyst didn’t tell me his office had been broken in by the FBI until after the trial. He got an ulcer for not telling me. He felt guilty about it.

Richter So many people you conferred with about the Pentagon Papers revealed your name. Wasn’t there an agreement whereby you get to keep your anonymity?

Ellsberg Oh, all the people I’d dealt with, the senators and representatives and Neil Sheehan of the New York Times, they all promised me that nobody would know my name.

Richter They broke their promises.

Ellsberg Yes. All of them. So I revealed myself.

Richter Why?

Ellsberg For the same reason Snowden did. We knew that other people would be suspected, maybe even charged, with circumstantial evidence. I wanted to be able to say as clearly as I could, under a lie detector if necessary, “I did this alone.”

Richter You must have trust issues since then.

Ellsberg No.

Richter No?

Ellsberg No.

Richter What happened on 3 May 1972?

Ellsberg They tried to “incapacitate” me totally, to beat me up or kill me on the steps of the Capitol. They were also tapping me. When the same people who had done this for the White House were found to be connected to Watergate, Nixon was afraid that they would make a deal with the prosecutors and confess the crimes they committed against me. So Nixon bribed them to commit perjury and to deny that they had done anything for him earlier. It was a web of crimes and lies that eventually served to bring him down – and made the war “end-able”, which is the important thing. It also ended my trial.

Richter So the big effect of the Pentagon Papers wasn’t so much the content, the revelations by themselves, but in the crimes that were committed against you by the government?

Ellsberg In a way, yes. Of course, the Pentagon Papers affected public opinion, there was a lot of discussion. But Nixon wasn’t influenced by public opinion. The war continued, in fact, it got larger the next year. As far as I could tell, the Pentagon Papers had been a total failure. If Nixon’s only worry was that I had only copied the Pentagon Papers, it would have had no effect, because these crimes would not have been committed against me. I would have gone to prison for life. And the war would have gone on. So it’s like Manning hoped for a lot of discussion in this country. And she got a certain amount of discussion. But it didn’t affect our policies in any way. The war in Iraq went on undisturbed.

Richter In Europe what had the biggest impact on people was the Collateral Murder video. Much more so than the documents.

Ellsberg I have to say unfortunately, although it was very impressive, and a lot of people saw it, the effect in America has not been so great. And there may be a reason for that.

Richter What reason?

Ellsberg My explanation usually is: Manning – and Assange – are revealing stuff that we did to other people. And humans’ ability to be concerned about what their group and their nation is doing to other people is...